Milton Terrace History

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THE STORY OF MILTON TERRACE

I decided to compile this history for several reasons:

It’s an interesting street. It’s a cul de sac, and so is more of a community than a through-street.

Unlike most streets which are laid out and then soon built up, it has undergone a gradual transition over 149 years, from semi-rural, as late as 1950, to urban as it is now.

It’s had some interesting people living in it.

Members of my family have lived in the street, or visited it regularly since it was created and I can remember many of the people who have lived here since the late 1940s. I also know something of people before my time, from stories told to me by my mother, and I have many photographs of the street and some of the properties. And Margaret Hay, who has lived here even longer than me, has been able to add still more information.

It would be a pity if the information I recall should be lost, as it will be of interest to my family and to the present and future owners of the properties.

Next year Milton Terrace will be 150 years old and so it’s an appropriate time to record its history.

I acknowledge the assistance of Margaret Hay, Maurice Bartlett, Ann Carter Jones, Julie Gilbert, John Taylor, Diana Thompson, Don Plested, John Gahagan, Phil Ryan and Ewan McGregor.

Robert McGregor

Map Reference
CROWN GRANT 504, 22 SEPTEMBER 1859
Plan of suburban sections 45, 46, 55 and Town

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LEGALITIES

Napier was first surveyed into Town and Suburban Sections in 1852 and 1854, and sections were offered for sale in 1855. The streets, as well as the town itself and other townships on the Heretaunga Plains, were named by Alfred Domett who was appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands and Resident Magistrate in 1854, and who was briefly Prime Minister of New Zealand. He chose names of Indian places and British generals who had performed well in India – performed well, that is, if you were British, and badly if you were Indian. A Pakistani tourist doing an Art Deco Walk some years ago, on hearing General Sir Charles Napier described as a hero, said “He was as thug”!

When Domett ran out of Indian names, he turned to giants of literature, and Milton Road was one result. Milton Terrace would have been named because it was a branch of Milton Road, a major road over the Napier hill.

With the exception of the original No 2 Milton Terrace, which was part of Suburban Section 46, all of the properties in the street were part of SS 45.

The first owner of Sections 45 and 46 after the town sections were offered for sale was William Seed, who also purchased Suburban Section 56, and Town Sections 424 to 427 on the east side of Milton Road, at the Battery Road corner, where he lived. Suburban Section 56 later became Amner’s Lime Quarry, then the Caltex petrol storage depot, and lastly the Amner Place subdivision

William Seed (1827-1890) was one of six people listed by Domett as being already in residence at Ahuriri in 1855. He had arrived in Wellington with his parents in 1840. Between 1851 and 53 he was Private Secretary to Governor Grey. He joined the Customs Department in 1853 and came to Ahuriri in 1855 as Sub-Collector of Customs & Treasurer, returning to Wellington two years later. He filled a number of positions in New Zealand and the Chatham Islands before retiring in 1887.

On his departure from Napier he was succeeded by Edward Catchpool as Director of Customs and Postmaster. According to “What’s in a Name” by Ian Mills, Catchpool bought SS 56 from Seed, but Rochfort’s field note-book (see page 4) states that the survey of SS 45 was being carried out for Mr Catchpool.

It was difficult to be sure exactly when Milton Terrace was laid out. I’ve always assumed that it was on Deeds Plan 39, dated 1870, surveyed by J Rochfort. But in researching for this history I came upon Deeds Plan 69, a later number but dated earlier, in 1865, and surveyed by H (or possibly A) Koch. The two plans show an identical subdivision except for two changes.

On Deeds 39, the small sections on the western side of Milton Road, are recorded as one lot (H), whereas on Deeds 69 it has been divided into Lots B to H where the small cottages now stand. (According to my father, these cottages were originally located on the fringes of the business area, and as that expanded and larger office buildings and shops were built, the cottages were moved by traction engine to small sites in Milton Road and other streets on the hill where excavation for fill had created small level sites.)

On Deeds 39, some lots (N/O and P/Q have two numbers, whereas on Deeds 69, N, O, P and Q are separate lots.

Both of those plans, along with all other plans that were drawn before February 1931, were destroyed in the earthquake, which wrecked the building housing the Lands & Survey Department in Shakespeare Road, in which all survey plans were housed. Many titles were also lost because they were held in lawyers’ offices which were destroyed. The existing plans have been drawn from surveyor’s field notes, with little more than basic information.

I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this as to the correct date. Maurice Bartlett, who worked at the Dept of Lands & Survey for 40 years, and Mark Dunnett, a surveyor who has possession of Rochfort’s field notes, both believe, having examined the field notes, that it is likely that the 1865 survey was never acted on and no titles were issued until the 1870 plan was registered.

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LEFT:
SO 5901 of 1968, defining the road to be closed and the actual road which had been in use since 1916.

BELOW:
The end of Milton Terrace from Roslyn Road, 1883.
The steps leading to Milton Road can be seen zigzagging down.
The house is the present No 13.

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DEEDS PLAN 39. dated 1870.
Surveyed by J Rochfort.
This plan subdivided Napier
Suburban Sections 45, 55 and 56.

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JEAN NESBITT..

FROCK AND MILLINERY SPECIALIST

New Address:
MASONIC BUILDING, HASTINGS STREET, NAPIER.
Phone 189.

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LEFT (WEST) SIDE

OLD No 8 (No 18)

It’s not clear which section this was originally part of as the boundary lines don’t coincide with those on Deeds Plan 36. However it was surveyed as Lot 1 on Deeds Plan 204, of date unknown but probably in the 1890s. The house wasn’t built until the 1920s, possibly at the same time as No 16.

The first owner of the property after the house was built was John Nelson, whose title was issued in 1928. For some reason Nelson didn’t speak to the neighbours, according to Margaret Hay, although the daughter, Pat, a school dental nurse, eventually came round.

In 1946 it was bought by Eric Evans and his wife. They were a quiet couple with no children. They didn’t seem to socialise with anyone in the street but Mrs Evans would greet people as she walked up the terrace to go to town, probably to catch the red Hospital Hill bus which detoured via Selwyn Road, Coleman Terrace and Milton Terrace at 2pm every weekday afternoon on its way from the hospital to town. But housewives had to carry their shopping all the way from the top of Milton Road when they returned home, or take a taxi.

Eric Evans, who was a clerk, was a keen cricketer when young, and Margaret says that the smell of the home brew that he made in the wash-house near the street boundary permeated the neighbourhood. Eric didn’t have a car until he acquired a Mini, probably in the early 1960s, and that created a problem because there was no vehicle access beyond the gate of No 13, where a barrier prevented progress down the increasingly steep and narrow lane which ended with the steps to Milton Road. The barrier was moved down to just above Eric’s gate, with an arm that could be raised to allow him to get as far as his property. If his brakes had failed, he would probably have become airborne.

Mrs Evans died in 1988, and Eric sold the house the same year to Ray Norrie who already owned no 15 and wanted to protect his view. The house was rented, and then sold by Ray in 1990 to Patricia Thomson and Tony Carson who later married. In 1998 it was sold to Bevan Lynch and Annaliese Kersjes and rented out.

No 16

This was surveyed in 1920 (DP 3910). It appears that there were two houses on the property, the second one (now No 16) owned by Arthur Hitchman of old No 6 and occupied by a member of his family.

Margaret Hay remembers the house being owned by the Fish family. Olive Fish was courted by Bob Wright (see No 6 on page 22), whose father, Arnold, was active in the Thirty Thousand Club and has one of the Marine Parade Colonnade arches named after him. The neighbours joked that Miss Fish had found her Mr Right. Bob had a noisy motor bike and when he delivered Olive home from a date, or more probably when he took off after delivering her, it would wake up old Mrs Connor who was in her dotage and would think it was morning and get up. It took some time to persuade her to go back to bed.

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When I was a boy the house was owned by Rosamund (Rosie) Clark, who bought it in 1932. She was a spinster and had artistic tastes. She was involved with the establishment of the Museum and Art Gallery, and had some good antiques and Persian rugs. She had a shop in Hastings Street, opposite the Tait Fountain, where she sold some antiques, a few books and not much else. But even then it was the quiet corner of town and it’s doubtful that she made enough from it to pay the power bill. She was often absent, leaving a ‘Back in 10 minutes’ sign on the door, taking her beloved dachshund Dinah for a walk. Dinah was given an annual birthday party with a poached egg and ice-cream cake. Rosie’s sister Violet (Vi) and her two children Ann and Hugh, would often drive down from Gisborne in a c1935 Morris 8. It must have been quite a trip, given the state of the road then.

Rosie used to drop in from time to time with what my mother called “one of Rosie’s concoctions”, leftovers of rather odd recipes that she had tried out.

In 1967, Rosie moved to a small cottage at 37 Napier Terrace and the house was bought by Ethel Mulvaney, a widow, who lived there until 1973 when she sold it to Bob and Ann Crozier. They moved to Taupo in 1978 and sold it to Brett and Kathrine Wallis. Two years later it was bought by Wayne and Valerie Kelsall who stayed there until 1983 when they sold it to Nola Dykes, another widow. She sold it to Glenn and Jessie Hearn in 1987, and they sold it to Terry and Kathie Exeter in 1990. They stayed until 1998 when it was bought by Michael and Nancy Moot, who sold it to the present owners, Phil and Paula Ryan.

At some point a garage was built as far as possible from the entrance and a huge area of concrete was laid. Some time around 2000, the roof water from the garage, discharging through a pipe that stuck out over the cliff, and probably also the run-off from all the concrete, caused a slip, but no serious damage was done because the house below, owned by Museum Director Jim Munro and his wife Nina, had been designed to withstand such an event. The pipe was then run down the cliff but during a heavy downpour around 2000, the pipe came apart and the resulting torrent caused a large landslide to land on the roof along with a tree. The house below was about to be sold but unsurprisingly the sale fell through. However massive construction, funded by the Earthquake & War Damage Commission with some additional expenditure by the owner, has stabilised the cliff. The cliff at that point is not the limestone rock that comprises most of the hill but is a sandy clay. Margaret Hay says that her mother told her that there was a slip there during the earthquake and the house had to be moved back closer to the street boundary. It is very close to the road, and the bank just inside the boundary has been cut back to an almost vertical face, which seems to confirm this. The massive concrete structure and the later pinning of the bank have made this possibly the most stable site in the street.

I’m indebted to Phil Ryan for giving me the details of the previous owners of this property, which has had more changes of ownership than any other in the street.

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OLD No 8 (Nos 14 & 16)

In 1896 this was owned by John Thomas Carr, the engineer who designed the Sea Wall in the 1880s. He also planned the diversion of the Tutaekuri River when Napier South was reclaimed which is why the diversion was called Carr’s Cut.

By 1912 it was the home of the Reverend Connor, the Presbyterian minister at the Port. At the uppermost corner of the site, where the upper gate is, were a line of buildings down the side boundary. The first was the coach house and presumably a stable, and a shed below that was at some time converted to a small flat. Mr Connor had a horse and gig, and when my mother was small, around 1910, she would run down to the fence to watch him go by in the gig. She said that it was the only vehicle in the street then, although the information about Captain Bower of old No 9 mentions that he had a stable, and therefore presumably a vehicle of some kind. Now there are nearly 30 cars in the street. I don’t know much about the Connors, except that the Rev. is buried in a triangular grave, with his father, also a Rev. Connor, in the old Hill Cemetery, alongside the path between the cemetery and the Botanical Gardens. He had a family including a son, also called Charles, and two daughters, Charlotte and Mary. Mary was a spinster and lived in the house until she went into Duart Home in Havelock North. At some point before that she moved into the flat and the house was rented to the Gardner family. They moved out when Mrs Gardener died of cancer.

No 14

Around 1949 Mary sold the property to Jack Smith and his wife, who had moved from Plymouth in England. Jack had just retired as a ship’s engineer. He had visited Napier on occasions while at sea, and the ship would spend time lying out in the roadstead while being loaded by lighters, large vessels (‘home boats’) being unable to birth until the construction of the new wharf in 1939. Looking up at the Napier hill, he would think that this was where he would like to live when retired. Mrs Smith (we always called her that – even my mother, although Jack was always Jack) didn’t feel quite so much at home here. I don’t even know what her first name was and neither does Margaret. She had lived in Plymouth through the war, where the bombing was intense, and all of their belongings, in storage, were destroyed. Jack was a keen golfer but she didn’t find it easy to make friends. She couldn’t stand flies and always had the windows shut tight in order prevent their entry, but as she couldn’t stand the heat either, life must have been difficult in the summer. She was short, stout and very plain. One day she and my mother were having afternoon tea on our front veranda and Mum was admiring Princess Margaret’s 21st birthday photos in the Auckland Weekly. “She is beautiful”, said Mum. “Huh”, sniffed Mrs Smith. “Fine feathers make fine birds. Give us the clothes, Mrs McGregor. Give us the clothes”.

The old Connor house was demolished, revealing, under the wallpaper, pages from the Illustrated London News pasted over the boards. Old magazines and newspapers were apparently a common substitute for scrim. In order to get a permit to build a new house during the post-war housing shortage, Jack had to agree to build two dwellings, and so the two storeyed building contained two identical units. These must have been given separate street numbers, 12 and 14, but when the two units were later combined into one, it was given the number 14, leaving No 12 with nowhere to go. The upper floor was reached by a ramp, as it still is, and the lower unit from the ground. Ewan believes that one of carpenters fell off the ramp when carrying the new bath into the top floor. The Smiths lived in the flat while the house was being built. When the buildings along the boundary were demolished, leaving only the bottom one as a small workshop, scores of religious books were found in one of the upper sheds. A feature of the property that was interesting to us children was a cave dug into the bank behind the house which was used for storage. The lower unit was rented by the Gordon family from Scotland, and then the Greenfields who had previously lived at the junction of Coleman Terrace and Selwyn Road.

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In spite of being a ship’s engineer, Jack had never driven a car and after buying a Morris Minor, he had to take driving lessons. The garage was built when they bought the car, and sat at the top of the original driveway down to the lower level of the section. Their daughter Robin, a nurse, worked in New Plymouth, but married an Englishman and returned to England. They’d also had a son, Archie, who had been an RAF pilot and was shot down and killed in 1940 in the Battle of the Barges over the channel ports where invasion barges were being assembled for Operation Sealion.

At the bottom of the cliff was a large rock. I don’t know whether Jack owned the land at the bottom of the cliff, which is on separate lots, but it may have been included on his title. Alternatively, as there were no houses down there, and the land sloped down to the edge of the footpath, he may have thought he owned it. Anyway, in 1954 he offered the rock to the City Council to be used as the base for the statue of Pania which was to be placed on the Marine Parade. The rock was considerably reduced in size while being prepared for installation.

After Jack died in 1966 or 67, I drove Mrs Smith to Wellington and handed her over to a friend of hers who put her on a ship to return to England to live with Robin and her family. The top flat was rented by Allan and Sue McLeod, who in 1968 bought the house at new No 6. No 12 was then owned by Brian and Rita Hurnard, who converted the two units into one house. In 1972 they sold it to Steve and Marion McKilliam, who owned it until 1979. It was during their tenure that the flat roof was removed and placed with a pitched roof, an operation which was carried out in one day by builder Wray Ewens and a team of helpers. It was then bought by David and Christine Campbell who in turn sold it to Dr Brian Gare in 1983.

LOT N/O – OLD No 4 (Nos 6, 8, 10, 10A)

This was owned by David Charles Hitchman, who owned a confectionary factory and shop in Hastings Street. He was a Borough Councillor in 1900 and failed to get a seat on the Harbour Board at around the same time. At an exhibition held at the Theatre Royal in 1884, he demonstrated lolly-making, while Mr Scarfe of old No 5 roasted coffee.

In the 1916 Street Directory the Hitchman family also occupied the adjoining property, which is confirmed by the name A Hitchman on what are now Nos 14 and 16 and Lucy Hitchman being shown as adjoining owner on DP 3910 of 1920, which redefined the boundary between Lot Q and Lot P, which became Lot 1 on the DP.

From 1939 until 1953 it was rented to the Taylor family. Jack Taylor was a meter reader for the Municipal Electricity Department and would appear at everyone’s front door with his torch and read the meter, in those days usually in a dark passage. The large house had one and a half storeys, but the upper storey, at the rear, is hardly visible in the photographs taken by my grandfather. As well as the usual rooms, including bedrooms for the four children (although Margaret slept under canvas on the upstairs veranda), it had a sewing room, a sitting room, a dining room, a breakfast room, a study for Jack and a small room that was a chapel. They were Anglicans, but Jack was involved with the Stella Matutina (the Temple of the Golden Dawn) in Havelock North. Every Christmas Mr Taylor would arrive home with a huge (it seemed to me) Christmas tree propped up in the dicky seat of their Austin car. It touched the high ceiling in the sitting room, and would be decorated with pre-war glass baubles and real candles which would be lit and eventually extinguished with a candle snuffer. The walls would be draped with red and green ropes of the type you could no longer buy during that period of post-war austerity and shortages. (We made do with paper chains and streamers, and plastic bells and balls on our tiny tree.) They had an elaborate crib with lots of animals. On Christmas Eve, visitors would arrive, the candles would be lit, incense burned and then the children would be ordered out while presumably some sort of ceremony would presumably take place.

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Mr Taylor was also a colour therapist and treated people with various complaints by shining coloured lights on to them in his study. They had several cats and on one occasion I saw a cat with a sheet over its body and only its head exposed, perched on the back of an armchair and bathed with a coloured light. In 1953 they moved to a small house in Havelock North, probably to be closer to the activities of the order which was based at Whare Ra, not far away.

In 1876 this property was occupied by Mrs Emma Cumming and her three children. Her husband George was in the constabulary fighting the Maori at Opepe on the Napier Taupo Road. That year Mrs Cumming died, leaving the children, aged from 10 to 15 years. They were sent to Gisborne by ship where they had relatives to care for them. Then years later, in 1942, when Mrs Taylor’s mother died in Auckland, the mother’s companion, named Alice Cumming, recognised Mrs Taylor’s Milton Terrace address as the place where she and her siblings had spent their early childhood. Genealogical research by the Cumming family later established that they were related to the Taylors. The Taylor family had often wondered how the children had fared, in the days when there were no welfare agencies or police, apart from the constabulary.

Until 1953, the road boundary has a picket fence painted dark red; this was quite a long fence as it stretched from the south side of the driveway down to No 6 all the way to the upper gate of No 14. The southern side of the section (Nos 6 & 8) was an old orchard with fruit trees growing among the long grass. From the bottom there was a precarious track down to Battery Road which we children would occasionally go down, one part so steep that a rope was permanently in place with which to lower one’s self. There were two enormous Norfolk Island pines on the property, one at the edge of the cliff and one near the road. Judging by their size, they could have been leftovers from the ones planted along the Marine Parade in 1890. A steep drive led straight down at right angles from the road, with two huge yew trees flanking it and arching over it. The red berries dropped when ripe, making the bitumen driveway squishy when walked on in bare feet. The Taylors had a large Austin two-seater, c1927, with a dicky seat, which was fun to ride in. One day we were going out in it when there was a minor accident. It was necessary to rev up and roar up the steep drive, and on this occasion a truck appeared across the gate as we approached. The brakes were slammed on and one of the passengers in the dicky seat, Frances I think, shot forward and cut her lip on the edge of the opening. The car ran backwards until it came to a stop wedged in the box hedge that lined the drive on both sides.

In 1945 I was invited to join them on a trip to town on Christmas Eve. It was the first time that the Norfolk pines had been lit up and the fountain had played since the wartime blackout and power shortages had put a stop to that. Everybody was there. We, and many others, had wooden clackers and made as much noise as possible.

In 1928 the property had been subdivided into three sections (DP 5055) but it wasn’t until 1949 or 50 that the first one (new No 8) was sold.

No 6

The bottom section was sold to Bob Wright (see present No 16), a concrete manufacturer who himself built a stylish modern house there around 1960. A few years after the house was built, he concreted the asphalt drive which was in poor condition. It took him a long time and aged him several years. After Dawn, his much younger wife, left him the house was sold to Allan and Sue McLeod. Allan was a lawyer who was a partner in Sainsbury Logan & Williams. The McLeods moved to Keri Keri in 1983 and sold it to Martin and Fay White, who 6 months later sold it to Graham and Jill Weaver who still live there.

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No 8

The top part of the orchard was sold in 1950 to Mrs Sheila Cuthbertson who built a small Spanish bungalow of the type now known as an Art Deco house, with a tiny flat underneath, which had no bathroom – the tenants had to share with the landlady. (I lived in it myself from 1961 to 1965.) I was visiting her one day when a woman called with a view to renting the flat but was turned down. I heard my mother explain to a neighbour that it was because “she was divorced”. How dreadful! Presumably that might mean that she would entertain a variety of men in the flat.

‘Cuthy’ was an honorary grandmother to me, as mine had both died when I was 4. She taught me to play Memory Patience, and almost always won in spite of her age. I used to do the vacuuming for her sometimes, for a shilling, using Una, a rather ancient Universal vacuum cleaner, although no more ancient than our Hoover. She always listened to ‘Dad and Dave’ on the radio at 7pm, which was preceded (or followed) by ‘God Save the King”, for which Cuthy always stood up, even when alone.

When her house was being built, my brother Ewan, who was aged 4 or 5 at that time, used to spend lots of time watching the builders at work and was always present at morning and afternoon smokos. Eventually he arrived home with a note pinned to his back saying “Does this child ever get fed?” Soon after, she moved in, Cuthy heard that the bottom of the orchard was to be sold to a couple (the Rosses, who eventually bought No 4) who were reputed to be communists, so rushed to town and bought it herself. She soon had the whole of the garden under cultivation, with a seat at the cliff’s edge for sitting and admiring the view.

A year or two later she was joined by her daughter Joy, who had been living in Waipawa where she was governess to her niece, Prue Jull who was intellectually impaired. After a while she purchased ‘Bluebird’, a blue Austin A30, the 1950s version of the Baby Austin. Joy was a physiotherapist by profession and was artistic. She was given to poetic language – “Oh what a joy to see the fruits of the earth in abundance” she once said when seeing some tomatoes growing in our garden. The neighbours were bemused by her painting each wall of her bedroom a different shade of yellow; no one had ever heard of that before. She used to make and wear extremely skimpy ‘play suits’. Believing that false modesty was a sin, she once greeted someone at the front door fresh from the bath and quite naked except for a towel flapped vaguely around. On hearing about this, John Graham, the grocer at the top of Milton Road, was interested to know at what time of day that had occurred.

Like Jack Taylor, Joy was involved with the Stella Matutina and in fact carried the sacred flame on her lap from Whare Ra in Havelock North to the Tauhara Centre in Taupo around 1977. It would be because Joy and Cuthy knew the Taylors that Cuthy would have heard that the section where she built her house was for sale. Likewise, her friendship with Eileen Morris would have been how Eileen heard that No 9 was available for rent.

Eventually Joy fell for a married man (Alistair Wallace) and was cited in Truth as the co-respondent in his divorce. In those days that was scandalous. She married him and moved to Auckland, later divorcing him and returning to Napier.

By the time Joy moved to Auckland, Cuthy had became too old to live alone and moved to Pamerston North to live close to her daughter Brenda. The house was sold to Miss Gwenda McQueen, who added a very ugly carport for her Volkswagen, alongside the drive into No 10. It was eventually demolished. Like Mrs Fairclough, she was a Christian Scientist, and eventually moved to London to work in the church there. The house was rented to Joyce Burch, the Truant Officer, and then sold to Bill and May Sabiston, parents of Dr David Sabiston, who enlarged the sun-porch. May was left a widow after a few years, and was also an honorary grandmother to my children Isobel and Angus. She was known to them as ‘Sabis’ and would often have them over for juice and biscuits. She would play the piano while they admired her colourful collection of animal jugs.

There have been several owners since then, including Michael Sinden and a young woman (name forgotten) who was wine-maker at one of the local wineries, who carried out alterations which included enlarging the downstairs flat by digging into the ground under the house and inserting a staircase from the floor above. The current owners are Euan and Sue Fenwick who have substantially enlarged the house and added a garage.

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No 10

In 1953 the old house was bought by Billy Fraser (see No 15), the master of the bucket dredge Whakarire, which used to grind away out in the bay. His tall and elegant wife Betty managed the French Glove House in Emerson Street. Billy demolished the house and after holding a New Year dance on the floor, he built, in his spare time, a very modern house which used some of the materials from the old house. The very wide kauri rusticated weatherboards were used vertically for the cladding and the high double-hung windows reached from floor to ceiling, although these have all now been replaced. The drive was re-aligned, but a later difference of opinion as to whether or not it encroached on No 8 resulted in the boundary being redefined in 1990 on SO (Survey Office) 10159.

Later the house was sold to Keith and Rita Eyles, who moved to Keri Keri, and then to Merle and Malcolm Campbell. Merle was a teacher at Napier Central School for a time, teaching a number of children on the hill. The Campbells engaged someone to trim the lower branches of the Norfolk Island pine nearest the cliff but unfortunately were away when it happened. The men removed so many branches that it looked like a power pole with a Christmas tree attached at the top. So when it was sold again to John and Barbara Cairns, they had the tree felled because it was deemed to be a risk being so close to the cliff edge. It was cut down early one Saturday or Sunday morning when my wife Helen and I were having a cup of tea in bed, reading and admiring the view. We hadn’t noticed the distant buzzing of a chainsaw, but when Helen saw the tree shiver, she said “Look”! I looked up and saw the tree topple and disappear over the cliff.

The Cairns sold the house to Trevor and Rae Mitchell in 2006. Extensive alterations and renovations were carried out. Two bedrooms, a bathroom and a study/library were added, the rest of the house was modernised and the roof was replaced. The garage built by the Frasers was demolished and a carport built at the north end of the rear yard.

No 10A

In 1989 the Cairns created a cross-lease subdivision (DP21541) and sold the top half of their property to Harry and Morna Fisher who built a house there. Before that could happen, the other pine tree had to be felled, a much more complicated procedure, being surrounded by houses. It was taken down in sections by a huge crane, and the roots removed, leaving a huge hole which was so large that the engineer had to revise his plans. Nobody passing by would guess that under the basement garage of the house is yet another basement.

The legal address of the property is Flat 1, No 10, but to avoid confusion it has been numbered by the owners as 10A.

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Lambton

Chilton

ADVERTISMENT
Sales by Mr Margoliouth
CITY AUCTION MART
REGULAR WEEKLY SALE
TO-MORROW (SATURDAY)
At 11 o’clock.
C. L. Margoliouth will sell – Potatoes, Onions, Carrots, Currants, Raisins, Starch, Blacking, Jam, Lollies, Biscuits, Tinned Fish, Macaroni, Crockery, Cigars of various sorts, Tumblers, 2 tons Flour (without reserve), 50 or 100 new Flour Bags, Parrots, Guns, &c.

At 2 o’clock
Furniture, consisting of Bedsteads, Washstands, Chairs, Spring Mattresses, Flock, 6 Sewing Machines (treadle), 1 Hand Sewing Machine, Carton and King Cooking Stove, 2 Gem Cooking Stoves, 2 Office Basket Grates, Coffee Mill, Cupboard, &c., &c.

Also –
A consignment of Grocery, Drapery, and Clothing to arrive per “Ohau.” Particulars not yet to hand.

C. L. Margoliouth, Auctioneer.

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Fig. 216. – The Hon. Algernon Gray Tollemache.

By courtesy Sir Douglas Maclean)